In a digital printing equipment, a control system, as a master control centre of the entire equipment, plays a decisive role in determining whether every step of each actuator of the entire equipment operates properly. A complete equipment generally has a sound flow of control, and the control system takes the responsibility for fully manipulating and maintaining the entire flow of control. Currently, designs of control systems employed in the industry are mostly centralized control system architecture. FIG. 1 is an architecture diagram illustrating a centralized control system from the prior art, which includes three parts according to the data flow. The first part is a host 10 responsible for performing functions such as initial configuration of the system, parameter setting, and initiation of a print job and the like. The second part is a main control board used to convert a received job into a page, and distribute the page to nozzle plates 30. The second part can further be responsible for functions such as receiving and configuring parameters sent from the host, receiving data, managing data, sending data and the like. The third part is a set of nozzle plates 30, which is responsible for receiving data and interfacing with inkjet devices, and used to convert the page into printing data suitable for nozzles to print, and drive the nozzle sets (not shown) connected thereto to print the printing data thereof. For different types of nozzles, the same type of main control board can be used, but nozzle plates are different.
It can be seen from FIG. 1 that a centralized control system is simple and easy to implement, and has significant advantages in performing system verifications and designing small-size systems, and thus is used widely. However, as the demand for printing is continuously increasing, a system needs to be expanded, for example, to be upgraded from monochrome printing to color printing, or to be expanded from narrow-format printing to wide-format printing. As a result, the number of the nozzle plates N will be multiplied, which causes the main control board to control more nozzle plates, and the needed resources and interfaces to be multiplied. In this case, the centralized control system faces problems such as system bandwidth bottleneck, interface bottleneck, failure of synchronous collaboration among modules and the like. Then it is necessary to redesign the main control board to meet the needs, and when the number of nozzle plates to be controlled reaches a certain amount, the resources required for a system will rapidly expand on one system board, thus the complexity of the design will increase greatly, which is unfavorable for system development and the subsequent debugging and operation.